Introduction and miscellanea

by Pat

Hello, ???, sholem aleykhem.

I’m a new TFA Corps member preparing to teach Secondary English in Detroit. With three weeks to go before induction, I’ve decided to start a blog on the off-chance that I will eventually come up with something to write and need an appropriate place to write it. For now, it’ll just be a run-of-the-mill journal blog. We’ll see how it develops.

Here follows my remarkably dull self-introduction. Feel free to ignore this paragraph completely. I’m a fresh Penn State graduate. I worked for the writing center at Penn State for three years under the legendary Jon Elvis Olson and supplemented that with extra tutoring jobs with the Comprehensive Studies Program (for lower-income and first-generation college students, mainly ESL students) and the Morgan Center for student athletes. I spent the fall of 2009 at NCCU in Taipei to improve my horribly weak Mandarin and there taught a weekly 10th grade English class. I’ve been a martial arts student for 14 years and an instructor for 6 years under Ted Cibik at Inner Strength in Leechburg, PA. There, I focus primarily on BJJ, Tang Soo Do, Pak Serat Silat, Taijiquan, and Bagua. I’ve supplemented that whenever and wherever the opportunity arose with Judo, Aikido, Yang style Taijiquan, and Changquan Shaolin gongfu classes. I’m engaged to a particularly wonderful young lady named Gretchen Fisk, and we’ve recently passed the fourth anniversary of our relationship. She’s a CPR and first aid instructor for the American Red Cross, and volunteers at a domestic violence shelter. We’ll be visiting her father and stepmother in Austin, Texas next week.
Hopefully that covers everything anyone could want in an introduction. Again, we’ll see how this goes. Thanks for reading.